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Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Creating special results in your custom search engine

By Kevin Gargoyle Lim, Custom Search Team

If you have a custom search engine, you can jazz up the customization gig by integrating Subscribed Links into your search engine. The Subscribed Links API enables you to create custom result snippets, as well as define the keywords or queries that would trigger them.

For instance, users who want to search for information about the comic book character Asterix might do the following: Type the search query in the search box, scan the search results for the most promising website, click the link to that website, wait for the website to load, and—finally—skim the page for pieces of pertinent information. However, if your custom search engine has a subscribed link for comic book characters, users can just type "asterix" in the search box and immediately get your custom result at the top of the results page. They don't have to scroll, scan, or click anything else to get the answer to their query.

Subscribed Links can directly answer questions, display links to services, provide news and status information, and calculate quantities, among other things. To get an idea of what you can do with Subscribed Links, read the developer guide and check out some live examples in the Google Subscribed Links Directory.

As if that's not cool enough, you can also integrate subscribed links created by other developers with your search engine. To learn more, read the Custom Search Developer's Guide.